The Teacher's Introduction to Pathological Demand Avoidance: Essential Strategies for the Classroom

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an indirect or implied demand (including any expectation, such as a question that requires an answer, food in front of you that you are expected to eat, or a bill arriving that needs to be paid). Title: Parents’ experiences of professionals’ involvement for children with extreme demand avoidance We don’t know. Because demand avoidance is currently understood as one characteristic in a person’s neurodevelopmental profile and is neither a diagnosable standalone condition nor is there a standardised assessment for the characteristic, there are no data to reliably indicate how common it may be. It is hard to draw conclusions from the limited and often low-quality research that exists. an internal demand (for example willing yourself to do something, or bodily needs such as hunger or needing the toilet)

Everyone experiences ‘demand avoidance’ (resistance to doing something that is requested or expected of you) sometimes. However, here we use demand avoidance to mean the characteristic of a persistent and marked resistance to 'the demands of everyday life’, which may include essential demands such as eating and sleeping as well as expected demands such as going to school or work.

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challenges and exhaustion from trying to find effective ways to reduce, disguise or remove demands and support the person This context is important when trying to understand the history of and debate around the label Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), which was proposed as a way to describe people experiencing demand avoidance alongside a group of behaviours that were then thought to be uncommon in autistic people (and therefore necessitated a new label, it was argued).

We know that autism is dimensional – it involves a complex and overlapping pattern of strengths, differences and challenges that present differently from one individual to another and in the same individual over time or in different environments. With my PDA kids, they will avoid things they want to do, if I put their favourite food in front of them they’ll have a meltdown because it ‘wasn’t what they asked for’ or they ‘can’t eat it right now’ or I ‘used the wrong colour bowl’. They want to eat it, they just can’t because it’s a demand. … Many PDAers will come out with reasons for why they cannot do something, often fantasy reasons such as saying they cannot get dressed because they are a dog and dogs don’t wear clothes, or they can’t get dressed because their legs are on fire.”A cluster of traits can be called a presentation or a profile – in some cases this can be quite different from what some people think autism ‘looks like’. Elizabeth is a pediatric occupational therapist specializing in a sensory integration framework with a focus on task analysis/ function with experience and certification in ASD/ PDA. She provides consultations and therapy for families and children. To support all autistic (or neurodivergent) people, whatever their strengths and challenges may be, there must be: PDA is becoming widely recognized in other countries to be a profile on the autism spectrum thanks to The PDA Society (UK) and PDA emissaries like Kristy Forbes and Ruth Fidler. However, US and Canada are still at an early stage in our understanding and PDA research is in its infancy.